Are We Still Brave?

Katherine Zoepf has a fascinating piece in this weekend’s Sunday Times magazine (already online) about the strange decline in Medals of Honor awarded to American soldiers. One wouldn’t be surprised, in this age of over-praising, to hear that there had been some sort of medal inflation. But in the case of the highest honor given to our troops, the opposite is true:

The Medal of Honor has been awarded only six times for service in Iraq or Afghanistan. By contrast, 464 Medals of Honor were awarded for service during World War II, 133 during the Korean War and 246 during the Vietnam War. “From World War I through Vietnam,” The Army Times claimed in April 2009, “the rate of Medal of Honor recipients per 100,000 service members stayed between 2.3 (Korea) and 2.9 (World War II). But since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, only five Medals of Honor have been awarded, a rate of 0.1 per 100,000—one in a million.”

Zoepf cites several theories: the changing nature of warfare; fears of getting it wrong; the exhaustive nature of the review process which, while intended to remove doubt, in some cases seems to inject it almost gratuitously. During the second battle of Falluja, Marine Sergeant Rafael Peralta took a bullet to his head and then, in his dying moments, pulled a grenade under his own body, saving the lives of his fellow soldiers. Or so it seemed to them: he was turned down for the medal, Zoepf writes, after the Pentagon got a pathology report from a doctor who wondered whether Peralta really knew what he was doing—whether he “would have been cognitively disabled and could not deliberately have brought the grenade in toward his body”: Zoepf:

Much of the anger expressed by officers and veterans groups about the decline in Medal of Honor awards reflects their perception that Pentagon officials are disrespectful, even dismissive, of eyewitness accounts by servicemen. The feeling is compounded by the fact that, in today’s military, younger servicemen sometimes have far more combat experience than their seniors now working in the Pentagon, who often progressed through the military hierarchy in a time of relative peace: after Vietnam but before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In a phone conversation with me, Robert Reynolds, one of the Marines who was with Peralta during the firefight in Falluja, expressed frustration that his testimony was not taken seriously. He, like Peralta, was shot during the firefight, and he said he clearly recalled Peralta smothering the grenade. “Knowing what Sergeant Peralta did for me,” he said, “it angers me to know that the Marines that day are basically called liars.”

It’s a bit like what Jeffrey Toobin, in a 2007 piece, called the CSI effect—the way juries, conditioned by police procedurals, expect that science can solve crimes, and so expect to see certain kinds of evidence.

So where do we get our ideas about war? We need to think more about what it means that combat experience has become a common experience in some sectors of the population and a completely alien one in others (and that goes to more than medals). Do those of us who judge bravery have a comic-book view of what it actually means to be under fire, or one that is so abstract that we think courage can be demonstrated scientifically? Will we get to the point of taking brain scans before handing out medals? I’ve never been close to a battle, but the fullest accounts of actual wars are filled with long stretches of boredom and absurdity. And then comes a moment when a man reaches for a grenade that’s about to explode. There are mysteries enough in that act when someone’s faculties are intact. Why would someone do that? Is it braver if it was an intellectual decision, or if it was blind instinct—the rawest expression of who the person was? The only thing one can say for sure about Peralta’s final moment is that it’s humbling.

Reynolds, the Marine who spoke to Zoepf, was angry about being, as he saw it, called a liar. That brings up another issue: What about the servicemen and women whom we have, for years, asked to be liars? No one who has looked seriously at the matter thinks that gays and lesbians aren’t in the military now; with all the soul-searching about who medal winners really are, the Pentagon has been happy to have many in the ranks pretend to be who they are not. When Admiral Mullen announced his support for repealing the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, earlier this year, the requirement to lie was the reason he cited, saying that,

For me, personally, it comes down to integrity: Theirs as an individual, ours as an institution.

That’s not an idle concern for a commander. Courage under fire may, on some level, be a puzzle, but there is a strong thread between it and integrity and all the qualities we would, one would think, like to see in soldiers—”valor,” the word inscribed on the Army’s Medal of Honor, gets at that connection. Today, the House voted to repeal D.A.D.T., and a similar measure is moving forward in the Senate; the caveat is that the plan allows for a review by commanders and certification of non-disruptiveness before service members will actually be allowed to stop lying. One hopes that the Pentagon won’t wallow in every possible delay. Whether or not it always appreciates their courage, the military should value our troops’ integrity, and their honor.

Amy Davidson Sorkin, a New Yorker staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.